


Same But Different

by zuzeca



Category: John Dies at the End - David Wong, Venom (Comics)
Genre: 80's Music, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Blood and Gore, Complicated Relationships, Dark Comedy, Diary/Journal, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Internalized Homophobia, Lovecraftian, Memory Alteration, Not What It Looks Like, Not a Crossover, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Parasites, Queer Themes, Rock and Roll, Tentacle Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2020-12-21 00:09:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21065486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuzeca/pseuds/zuzeca
Summary: Clad in Malekith's Dreamstone, Eddie Brock walks the streets of New York, meets a stranger, and learns about memory, reality, and himself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all, just call me Lot's Wife this fine evening, because I am a pillar of _salt_. I've been working on this on and off from under a pile of work and real life since April, and despite it not being finished, in light of...certain events, I've decided to go ahead and start posting it in solidarity even though I know it's the Devil telling me to do so. What can I say? Steaming piles of inept Lovecraft mimicry apparently fuel me? I know that's not a particularly joyful reason to write, but I wrote this anyway so I might as well share. And it's bringing me joy to actually indulge in writing this, to dive into the comedy and monstrosity and bizarre and complex and yet delightful queer love story which lurks at the beating heart of Venom, to be read and hopefully enjoyed by some of the fans who've felt alienated by the current comics, 100% for free. Bless you, AO3.
> 
> This diverges from the canon from the beginning of the Venom crossover with the _War of the Realms_ event and incorporates some elements from _Web of Venom: Funeral Pyre_. Also keep in mind that this is less a "canon divergence" than it is utilizing the canon the way parasitoid wasps utilize the bodies of caterpillars. That said, it doesn't shy away from the oeuvre of bullcrap which we've been served, so yes, there's some dealings with abuse and rape elements. If that's not your thing, please don't hesitate to head for the door, but also please keep three things in mind:
> 
> 1\. No, I'm not going for "it was all a dream". I consider that a perfectly respectable response to this disrespectful pile of canon nonsense, but I like to play on Hard Mode.
> 
> 2\. That does not mean every element introduced by said disrespectful pile of nonsense is "real" in the context of this story. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is as it seems. Watch that "Parasites" tag, boils and ghouls, it'll be important later.
> 
> 3\. I'm ripping off elements from a writer who actually _does_ know how to write cosmic horror, and comedy, so if you've read any of the _John Dies at the End_ series, don't be surprised if you recognize a few things.
> 
> Journey with me, dear readers, and let's see how far down the cosmic rabbit hole goes.

There is always an old woman.

She slots into the tale like a sharp blade in flesh. Her gnarled fingers hold poisoned apples, magic trinkets, spin the threads of fate that bind the limbs and loop the throat. She is good, and evil, and indifferent.

And she is never, ever what she seems.

Eddie watches the gleam of the jewel as it turns in her hand. The sound of her voice against the echoing silence in his own head is discordant. She tells him he craves a weapon. Craves it, like the thrum of endorphins in his blood after a good workout, or the rush of dopamine from a hearty meal. Craves it, like the like the blissful coloquy of thought-impressions from beyond the grim and distant stars. Craves it, like a parent’s love, a child’s, a lover’s.

If such is craving, then all of mankind is built on craving.

He takes the stone, because at least it is a choice to do so. It is sharp, the material strange and opalescent, as if chipped from the eye of some ancient effigy of a deity which time forgot. He holds it, feels it take hold of him.

From where we begin, we always return.

The dark ocean rides over his skin, associated in the roots of his brain with _ safe _, for all that new memories scream and shriek like harpies that he is not safe, can never be safe again. He stretches newly metamorphosed claws and uncoils his serpents tongue to taste the air, linking to an organ of which his human brain so recently found itself bereft.

But something is wrong.

The envelopment feels like dead meat, familiar sensation and alien silence. Or perhaps only alien from this particular quarter. He thinks of Cronos, feverishly devouring his children, damning them to silence and chains as he himself was once damned. Is he himself now stitched within the lindworm’s belly, or emerging at last with nothing but the night air to touch his new and monstrous skin?

Is it transformation, or pupation?

The boy watches him, fear and fascination in his eyes, and he thinks of how little it would take to devour him. The old woman smiles. Her blood and bone crunch between his teeth.

The same, but different.

“Let’s go,” he says, and the boy follows.

None of the Dark Elves can stand against him, The slice of muscle and sinew under his claws is as natural as breathing. Nothing even gets near the boy. They forge their way into the darkness of the city streets.

“Are you okay?” says the boy, disrupting the rhythm of their footsteps.

“Fine,” he says. “There’s nothing in here to mess with my head.”

“You mean no one.”

His steps falter, just a moment. “It’s just a tool,” he says, and remembers smiles on blue lips.

They stop at a dive bar, a rotting, industrial building with a faded sign adorned with apples. It’s dark inside, but warm, and smells of food. Only one patron. The barkeep is a woman, big busted, her dark curls spilling over her shoulders as she wipes down the countertop, as though oblivious to the uproar outside. His new flesh sings at the sight of her.

“Welcome, traveler,” she says. She spots Dylan in his shadow. “Travelers. Oh my, I’m not sure we have a seat tall enough for you.”

“I’m okay,” asserts Dylan. “I’m big enough for a stool.”

“I’m sure you are, young man.” The woman sets her rag down. “Let me see if I can track down some milk in the back. Cider’s no good for a wee one.”

“What else do you have?” Eddie says.

She raises an eyebrow. “Cider, cider, and cider. You want beer or mead you need to go elsewhere.”

“Any food?”

“For travelers with little hangers on, yes.” She vanishes into the back and he sits at the counter, a significant distance from the hunched man occupying it. Dylan hops up beside him. The counter hits him just across the chest, enough that he can see over it, but it makes it awkward to rest his arms.

“Are you going to stay like that?”, Dylan says, after a few moments of silence.

“Like what?”

Dylan gestures near his mouth, crooked finger forming the shape of a fang.

“Oh.” He concentrates, feels the slick flesh—no not flesh, merely substance—withdraw from around him. “I forgot.”

“How do you forget?”

“We—it’s been a long time. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Everyone says that.”

The woman returns, two tankards in hand. “Milk for the little one, and cider for you. I think I saw some bread back there, and some of the good cheese. I’ll be a moment.”

The tankard looks huge in Dylan’s hands. He steadies it against the counter and sips at the milk. Eddie drinks some of the cider and wipes at his mustache. He’s still not used to the mess that comes with so much facial hair.

The woman slides a plate with bread and cheese and bright slices of apple beside them. Dylan perks up and reaches.

“More cider?” she says, not at him, and Eddie eyes the stranger out of the corner of his gaze. He’s somewhat pudgy, his dark hair flopping into his eyes, beard stubble populating his neck and chin. There’s a shotgun on the counter beside him, a weird, custom piece with three barrels. He’s drinking in the grim, determined way of those who do it often, and hate it.

“I said until I said stop, didn’t I?” says the stranger.

She snorts. “I’ve no intention of having to sweep you out the door with a mop. You’ll get one more.”

“Some gratitude,” says the stranger. “And after I filled that one asshole who came in hassling with buckshot.” He lifts his head and catches Eddie’s gaze. “Problem?”

“Not unless you’re looking.” The man seems unphased, though he had to have seen Eddie’s transformation. He takes a swig from his tankard and sets it down, but doesn’t let go.

“No need for that,” says the man. “But you’re not the first motherfucker I’d have tangled with. Not even the ugliest.”

Eddie scowls at him. The man’s gaze flicks past him to Dylan and mutters something that sounds like ‘always with the kids’. “I’m Dave.”

“W—I’m Eddie.”

“Awfully ordinary name for a dude who came in looking like an anglerfish made it with a pro wrestler.”

“It’s just a tool. I’m human, like you.”

“Bold of you to assume that. As for tools, I think I’ll stick with a good old-fashioned shotty.”

“I’ve known far too many things resistant to bullets.”

Dave shrugs. “Flamethrower then. Almost none of the lurkers in the dark like being set on fire.”

_ Including us. _

The comment flicks across his brain so easily it catches Eddie flat footed. His fingers tighten around the tankard. There is no us, not anymore. He has to keep reminding himself. “What would you know of it?” he grits out. “What would you know about facing down an entity with powers beyond your grasp? The kind of strength that strips you bare, digs itself into the deepest reaches of your psyche? The kind that _ infects _ you with the abyss?”

Dave raises an eyebrow. “Poetic. You go to college for that?”

“Fuck you.”

“And you talk that way in front of kids?”

Eddie glances back at Dylan, who looks as if he’s pretending not to listen. Dave snorts.

“I’m going to give you some advice, Mr. Stone Cold Steve Anglerfish. Because those entities, those powers? We go way back. Like that fucking annoying neighbor with the yapping dogs and the reeking trash bins from all the cats in the neighborhood they killed and skinned. I know them better than I wish I did. And I’m telling you right now.”

Dave pauses and takes another drink.

“Well?”

“They’re children,” says Dave.

“Children? Don’t be ridiculous, he—”

“Children,” repeats Dave, as if Eddie hasn’t spoken. “Cruel, idiot children with the sense of humor of that racist fourteen year old you met while playing MMO shooters.”

“I don’t play video games.”

“Of course you don’t. Doesn’t make it not true. They’re children. Big, fucking, cruel, unspeakably dangerous children.”

Eddie stares at him. “That’s impossible. Knull, he looked...like a warrior.”

“Like a warrior, or a little boy’s feeble imaginings of one? Let me guess, it made itself look like some generic unkillable badass with a big sword? Did it also have an ‘everything-proof’ shield?”

Eddie frowns. “I…”

“What, you’ve never seen Conan? Movies raised us, city-boy. Your mind puts a familiar face on something it _ cannot comprehend. _”

“And what does it matter?” spits Eddie. “What does it matter if it kills you looking like some kind of unimaginable cosmic horror or wearing Schwarzenegger’s face?”

“Now _ that _ would be entertaining.” Dave chuckles into his tankard. “But it’s not the _ point _ , is it? You say you know what power they have, and I’m telling yo that you know _ nothing _ . Time, space, memory, reality? All theirs. They can reach back and take people and it’s like they were never there. No, not like, they _ are _ never there. They never existed in the first place.”

Eddie’s stomach clenches. “What the hell are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying that you can’t trust anything. They’ve got all the time in existence to fuck with you, and that’s their favorite game. The only one they know.”

Dave falls silent. Eddie stares into his tankard.

“You’re saying they...entities like that. They could...make someone disappear? Like a family member? Someone you knew well? The memories and all? Everyone’s memories?”

“Easy as pie.”

Eddie turns to watch Dylan, quietly nibbling on his chunk of bread, and doesn’t ask his next question. The boy has a peculiar way of eating, twisting off tiny pieces and transferring them into his mouth, one tiny bite at a time. Eddie breathes deep, tries to quiet the discordant piping of his thoughts. “And by fuck with you…”

“Anything. They used to tweak the McDonalds logo in my hometown so it looked like Ronald was disemboweling himself. Just to me of course. Charming fucks.”

“They can make future events happen?”

“Yes and no. They can always make you _ think _ something happened, but I doubt if their control was so fine tuned they’d have let me and my buddy shove a bomb up their asses.”

Eddie digests this. “So they can make you doubt your perception of reality.”

“Sounds like a bitch, doesn’t it?”

Despite the warmth of the tavern, Eddie feels suddenly cold. They drink in silence.

“I...I recently broke up with someone.”

“Congratulations? Sympathies? What Hallmark card you want?”

“I thought that they were making me sick, that I’d never been sick until they made me sick in the first place. The things I was most afraid of...I thought they were lying to me. I thought…” His gaze darts over to Dylan and quickly back. “I thought they did it because they were afraid I would leave them.”

“Jesus, you two sound like a pile of work. So you left.”

“Yes.”

“Good for you?”

“But I’m wondering...there’s so much of it that doesn’t make sense. There’s memories, and I know that I have them, but the decisions...other people’s decisions, they didn’t make any sense either.”

“So you’re only now questioning why it was that an overstuffed nightmare sundae of all your worst fears, and all your partner’s worst fears, got served up to you all nice and convenient?”

Eddie’s stomach drops into his shoes. “Oh.” His heart accelerates, a sickening sensation. “Fuck.”

Dave snorts. “You know, Eddie. For a guy who went to college, you really sound like a dumbass.”

Eddie drinks to soothe his suddenly dry mouth. “But they...I thought they did something unforgivable. They told me they...they told me they were afraid.”

“Only people who aren’t afraid in this world are idiots. As for unforgivable...I guess you’re going to have to figure that out yourself.”

“But what if they...did something, to someone who’s gone? Who can’t forgive? They were _ made _ by it, the abyss, the entity, made to be monsters. Am I supposed to just turn my back and pretend it never happened? To keep...house with a…”

Dave’s gaze flicks past Eddie towards Dylan, just for an instant. “Maybe not. But there’s more monsters in this world than you know. And not all of us are all one way, or all another.”

Eddie’s head sags. “I know that I’m also a—”

“It this typical for you to talk about yourself all the time? Because I feel like that would try your monster’s patience. Or anybody’s.”

Eddie bristles. “Oh excuse me, did you want to talk about yourself instead?”

“Nah, I’d rather talk about how dense you are. Talking about monsters while looking right at one.”

“You?” Eddie tenses, giving Dave a once-over.

Dave smiles crookedly. “Your partner isn’t the first, or the only one to be made by an asshole entity. There’s a lot to be said about choices, but I know a lot more about being a monster than you think. And I don’t know if it says good things about you that you don’t notice.” His expression turns contemplative. “But if you broke up, well...that still implies you were together, and maybe that means you were made to keep their company.”

Eddie rests his fingers above his chest, just for a moment, where he can feel it, the silence and emptiness. The boiling anger has drained away, leaving only a hollow ache of scalded flesh. “I hate how much I miss them,” he says, quiet, hoping Dylan won’t hear. “I hate that the last thing I told them was…” He swallows hard.

Dave sighs. “You’re a piece of work, Mr. Anglerfish. You and your little family.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

There’s a chime, the sound of a text message received. Dave rummages in his pocket and extracts a phone. He squints at it. “I gotta get going. My girl and my buddy’s monster roommate are coming to pick me up.” He offers Eddie a little, sarcastic salute. “Stay safe, College Dumbass. Watch the shadows.”

Eddie watches him leave. There’s a hollow core of icy exhaustion forming within him. It feels disconcertingly fragile, as if it might shatter at the slightest touch. Dylan has finished his apple slices and is picking at the bread and cheese.

“Do you not like it?”

Dylan freezes, as if caught, and Eddie has a very brief but very distinctive memory of sitting at the dinner table with Carl, that cutting tone he can so clearly recall, the words a jumbled mess that his brain cannot resolve. “It’s okay if you don’t like it,” he says, suddenly. “You shouldn’t be eating candy for every meal or something, but if you don’t like it and you’re not hungry, you don’t have to eat it.”

“The bread is okay,” says Dylan after a minute. “The cheese tastes funny.”

Eddie picks up a chunk of it, sniffs. It’s strong smelling, like it’s been left out. He doesn’t recognize the kind; how long has it been since he’s thought about something as mundane and specific as cheese varieties? 

“Then eat the bread,” he says. He takes the cheese and bites into it, the nutty, salty taste exploding across his tastebuds. No sense in wasting calories after all.

Dylan’s eyes widen, as if he hadn’t expected this response. He goes back to twisting at his hunk of bread.

“Dad would get mad,” he says after a few moments. “If I didn’t finish. Said I was being disrespectful.”

Eddie sighs. It’s too jumbled in his head, the visceral response to Carl and the reeling knowledge that Dylan is his responsibility. He feels stripped, out of his depth with this child, the old memories too close to the surface. It makes it hard to differentiate, to separate the what-happened-to-him from the what-happened-to-Dylan. He knows the boy wants comfort, in the way they all do, before the world beats it out of them. Tells them they’re weak for crying, weak for wanting.

Weak for loving.

_ You made me weak! _

In retrospect, the words didn’t even make sense. His other had made him weak? Even if they had taken his memories, had made him reliant, that in of itself wasn’t actually weakness. Had it been weakness to rely on Lunella? On Dr. Stevens? On Liz or M’lanz? On…

His stomach lurches with sickness. His mind seems to slip, to try to slide off the thought, as if it seeks to float out of reach. But the memory fixes in his mind.

Sleeper.

He’d held the child as close to his heart, to his head, as he ever had his other. They’d moved as one, driven by mutual intent. He’d felt their love, love for their other parent, love for _ him _.

And never once had they indicated that something so heinous might be amiss.

Was he to believe that they both had lied so thoroughly? Had spun a complex framework to keep him close? That they had laughed and argued over music and fought in joined purpose while they hid lies from him on their other parent’s behalf?

And what of Toxin? Bitter, angry Toxin who howled and hated and joined him in mutual destruction of the being they both saw as the source of their pain. Was he to believe that Toxin would have willingly continued that level of subterfuge? For a being they only wanted dead? 

A memory crystallizes, of lying on the floor, looking up into a face, _ their face _ , the face of his other and man he sees as superior, but contorted to look like _ them _. A memory of defense, of fending off death in the face of hatred and murderous intent.

_ They’ve always kept you alive. Even when it didn’t serve them. Even when you hated them, hurt them. Even when it would have been better if you were gone. _

His head aches, a stabbing sensation behind the eyes and along the back of the skull. He feels exhausted, a deep tired pain in his bones. The silence hangs in the back of his mind like an accusation.

_ Oh god, I’ve been an idiot. _

Once again, he has no idea what to do.

Beside him, Dylan has finished his bread. He sticks, a splinter in Eddie’s mind. Dylan, and Dylan’s existence, Eddie’s thoughts fracturing around _ how _ and _ how could they? _

_ Time, space, memory, reality? All theirs. _

He tries to focus. He needs...something. To know, to be certain, to understand _ why _ and _ how _ and all the other resultant questions. All the driving forces which pushed him forward in his job, the job that he’d loved. The job that destroyed him. The job that he destroyed.

He suspects there might be a pattern to be found in all this.

He needs to find them.

He looks again at Dylan, trying to weigh his options, trying to decide how to proceed. He has the weapon to defend them, but where to go, where to look?

Can he still...sense them?

Do they even want him to?

His chest aches and he rubs at it. Dylan looks at him with a child’s mix of unease and expectation and he feels like a tool.

He closes his eyes briefly, masters himself, addresses Dylan quietly.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve made a hash of things, I think. With you and...anyway. There’s something I need to do, but you’re involved now, and you didn’t ask to be. I don’t know if there’s anywhere safe in the city, but I might still have some contacts who’ll still speak to me. I can take you somewhere you might be safer.”

“What do you need to do?”

“I need...I want to find them. My—them.” It feels obscene to say it aloud now, like he’s not _ allowed _, after all that’s happened.

_ How can you think you’ve brought anything but misery to every life that touches yours? _

He hates it, the voice that’s there now in the silence. Hates how now it feels like it’s right.

“The...the one that was in there with you?”

“Yes.” He scrubs at his jaw. “I’m sorry.”

Dylan’s brow crumples, confused. “Why?”

“Because...because of a lot of things. Because I said… Because I’m out of practice with kids and it’s not on you to bear the brunt of that. I’ve only ever had the one, and they...grew up pretty fast.”

Dylan cocks his head, eyes going a little wide. “I have a...nephew? A niece?”

“Uh,” the response catches him flat-footed. “Neither? They never told me if they liked one or the other. But yeah, I guess you do?”

“Huh,” Dylan looks thoughtful. “What are they like?”

“They…” The thought of them cracks open something raw in his chest. “They like listening to The Kinks.”

“The what?”

“A band.”

“Dad didn’t play music at home. What do they sound like?”

He looks at the boy, a spiked, agonizing feeling turning over inside him. “You’ll have to ask them someday.”

Dylan nods. “Okay.” He cracks a small smile. “I’ve never been an uncle before. Or a brother.”

_ You are a brother, even if you don’t know it. They would like you, I think. _

He sighs and scratches at his itching scalp. He wonders if he’s picked up lice, strange to have to worry about that now. “I want...to find them,” he admits. “We need to talk about things. But I don’t want you to be hurt.”

Dylan looks a little puzzled. “By them? They didn’t hurt me. They pulled me out of the car with Dad before they...left.”

All of the air exits Eddie at once.

“What?”

Dylan shrugs, uncomfortable. “They...did something to him, but they didn’t hurt me. Just left me with you. Said they were sorry.” He frowns. “They didn’t say about what.”

He hops off the bar stool and looks up at Eddie.

“Where do we go?” he says.

Eddie pauses, thinks. In the privacy of his own mind he can admit he’s afraid to try, but what else can he do?

It’s different now, reaching out, listening. He wonders if the threads between them are severed, but no, they’re there. Frayed and shredded, thin and tangled as spider silk, but present, tenacious and clinging.

It’s dark, the night a blurred, dim lit kaleidoscope of streetlights and headlamps. He feels rain on his skin and cold so cold but it’s not cold from the outside it’s cold from within, weariness and exhaustion and aimless walking and the deep, oppressive weight of being totally alone in a crowded street. 

But no hunger, he realizes with a frisson of shock. It’s gone out, like a flame extinguished, but the emptiness remains.

_ What happened? _

He sees a blurred glimpse of a street sign: Cherry and Jackson.

Corlears Hook, near the East River.

The images fade out and he rubs his eyes.

“They’re not too far,” he says. “On the Lower East Side, by the waterfront. Did Carl ever take you to the park down there?”

Dylan shakes his head.

“Didn’t take me there either,” says Eddie. “Come on, let’s go, and stay close.”

The streets are slick with rain and paved with scurrying passersby, but the eye of the conflict seems to have moved elsewhere. He thinks he should go, should _ render assistance _ but then the sky near the distant spire of the Chrysler Building crackles with unnatural lighting.

New York has its protectors for tonight. And Eddie...Eddie’s responsibilities lie elsewhere.

He feels like a moron for forgetting that neither of them have rain coats. Holds Dylan’s small fist and herds him along the dark and slippery streets. Most of the cars they encounter are abandoned, but here and there one skids past, the glaring eyes of its headlights piercing the night.

Many of the street lamps are dark, smashed or disconnected from the power grid. It’s deeply wrong, this darkness in his city, like a sliver of deep space, the distant winking stars of windows in the distance.

He scans the spackled crowd, but sees nothing. Have they...found another host? He looks desperate from person to person, suddenly, uncomfortably aware that they could be anyone.

A young man on the far corner of Cherry pauses to look at them. He’s skinny, wrapped in plain jeans and a grey sweatshirt, the hood pulled up against the rain. His face is hidden in a slash of shadow.

He turns away and starts to walk. Something in Eddie’s heart lurches.

He stumbles off the curb, dragging Dylan with him, choking on words of _ wait _ and _ please _ and _ is it you? _

He has a split second before he’s blinded by headlamps. Squealing tires and the deafening honk of a horn. He’s tangled, discombobulated. He yanks Dylan up, staggers, tries to find the trigger for the weapon but it slips from his grasp. Filthy water drenches them and the car horn blares again.

And then he’s snatched, hurtled through the air, yanked right off his feet, still clutching Dylan. There’s dark ropes around his arms and chest and something in him cries out in joyful recognition.

They’re deposited on the far corner, at the feet of the young man. Eddie scrambles, turns to face them.

“You,” he says.

The young-man-who-is-not-one recoils. The ropes vanish, snapping out of sight. They turn on their heel and run.

“Wait!” And then he’s lurching to his feet, hoisting Dylan in his arms, pounding after them. “Come back!”

They make no sign that they’ve heard. He charges after them, dodging past pedestrians. They veer, heading away from the park and the waterfront, making for the residential areas. His eyes are blurred from the rain and his chest feels like it’s on fire. He misses a step, and has to halt to keep from falling.

“Please,” he chokes out. “Please, wait.”

To his shock, they do. Their steps falter, and they turn back to face him, face hidden still.

Slowly, Eddie approaches. Dylan’s arms are iron bands around his neck. They tense as he steps closer, but don’t run.

“You,” he starts, and realizes with panic he doesn’t know what to say. “Who’s here with you now?”

Their frame stiffens. Eddie crumples.

“I’m sorry, it’s not any of my—”

** _“No one.”_ ** Their voice is flat. ** _“Just me in here.”_ **

“No one—”

** _“No one,”_ ** they snap. There’s an infrabass echo in their tone, something that rumbles a warning to the scrabbling animal instincts in the roots of Eddie’s brain. He knows without knowing that this is _ wrong _. A disruption of the unnatural order.

“Can we...can we talk?”

They stare at him. ** _“Now? You want to talk now?”_ **

“I just—”

** _“I begged for us to talk!”_ ** And the roar of their voice splits the night. Behind them, Eddie sees a man skid to a halt and turn and run in the other direction. ** _“Begged for you to listen! You drove me out! Ejected me, cast me like the serpent from the garden!”_ **

Eddie flinches back and Dylan’s arms tighten around him.

** _“And now,”_ ** they growl. ** _“Now you want to talk. Always talking, talking, with your pointless, human words! I remember when we didn’t need words! What words do you want to use now, little, talking altar boy? What sermon have you come to preach?”_ **

“Nothing,” says Eddie, desperate. “No sermon. Please, can we go somewhere?”

The shadows writhe around them, a mix of darkness and dark flesh. ** _“And why should I go anywhere with you?”_ **

“Because…” Eddie chokes on the words. He hangs his head. “You shouldn’t.”

Silence, nothing but the pounding of the rain and the hiss of distant cars on wet pavement.

“You shouldn’t,” says Eddie. “I’ve got nothing and no reason you shouldn’t go anywhere else. With anyone else. You should have let me blow my brains out in the church pews rather than let me do what I did. All I’ve got are apologies. Apologies that I should have asked for answers instead of making accusations. That I should have considered things clearly. That I should have remembered what we’re dealing with, and the lengths it would go to hurt us.”

** _“There is no ‘we’ any longer.”_ **

The words are a punch in the gut. “No...I guess not.” He swallows hard. “But please? Can we talk? Somewhere quiet, out of the open?”

There’s a long silence. Eddie holds his tongue.

**_“You readily believed that I would manipulate your every memory and waking thought,”_** they say. **_“On the word of another, you believed that I would make you ill, hurt you, isolate you from everyone and everything, over and over again, to keep you by my side. After I turned my back on my own kind for you. After Beck. After the child. After Father Shelnut. After everything and everyone. After all the distance we had come, and it took no more than a flick of a careless, resentful, cosmic finger and you devolved into paranoia.”_**

“Yes.” His eyes burn, rain collecting on the lashes.

** _“So you see, Eddie. All we are is built on pillars of sand.”_ **

“Maybe yes.” His breath heaves, billowing like smoke clouds in the cold rain. “But I built sandcastles with you once, and I’d do it again. One time, a hundred times, against the tide, against the time. I’m willing to rebuild as many times as it takes us to get it right.” He looks into the shadowed face. “Any number of times, if you’ll build with me.”

They look aside and his heart squeezes.

** _“And how many times?”_ ** they ask. ** _“How many times will we eviscerate each other before there is nothing left but hollow husks?”_ **

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t have an answer. But we’ve both come a long way. We’re not empty yet. And cups...cups can be refilled. Refilled by...the emotions we share.”

He could hear it sometimes, on the edge of his consciousness. In words, almost unheard, at the precipice of destruction. Without them, in the endless moments in which they’d touched and danced and sang together.

** _I love you, Eddie._ **

Something between a growl and a groan emerges from them. ** _“Why, Eddie?” _ ** they say _ . _ ** _“Why can you not just let it go?”_ **

“You know why,” he says. “I don’t have the right to say it now, but you know why. You’ve been in my head. You’ve always known.”

They look him over from beneath the shadow of their hood. Eddie is suddenly aware that he’s shivering, that Dylan is soaked and trembling against him.

** _“Come on then,”_ ** they say, gruff and a touch bitter. ** _“Let us get out of the rain, and we will _ ** **talk** ** _.”_ **

“Thank you.”

** _“I don’t want to hear it.”_ **

They turn, and he follows, Dylan a heavy and aching weight in his arms. They walk into one of the alleys behind an unlit building, a place for darkness and dark things.

He follows them without hesitation.

He finds them standing below a fire escape. Without a word, they jump, launch themselves lightly up to the platform. They bend over to peer in a window, do something out of sight, and slide open the dark mouth.

He thinks he should engage the weapon, use it to follow, but pauses. It feels gauche somehow, embarrassing to reveal it. 

_ I couldn’t bear to be without you, so I remade our face in the war songs of a mad elf. _

Yes, that sounded perfectly stable.

But before Eddie can say anything, they turn back from the window, look down at them as if from a medieval balcony seat. His other hesitates, just a moment, then reaches down to coil careful tentacles around Dylan and lift him up the fire escape to the window. They push the ladder down and it descends with a clang.

An invitation, albeit a cautious one.

Eddie wraps his fingers around rain-slick metal and follows them.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, and thank you to those of you who've willingly and patiently climbed onboard to follow me on this bizarre adventure. Here's where we start getting into the difficult discussions and the topsy-turvy convolutions (it wouldn't be in the vein of JDatE otherwise). Also heads up that there is a (very bizarre) sex scene at the end of this chapter if that's not your jam. It involves some reference to internalized homophobia.
> 
> Also, as it might not be obvious and we were not given much in the way of information regarding Dylan's age, I'm ballparking him as being about 9 years old.

The power is out in the apartment, but there’s still gas running to the tiny stove. They put Dylan on the couch, wrapped in an excess of fluffy towels from the linen closet. Eddie ransacks the cupboards for supplies. He turns round, a box of macaroni and cheese clutched in one hand, to find his other has filled a pot of water and set it on the stove. They’re holding a book of matches, looking at it with the faintest hint of unease.

It’s strange, discombobulating to see them like this, human-shaped and rail-thin and _ separate _. He knows the pain of separate. Remembers it from that dark place of restraints and needles and leering eyes. The hunger and misery and loneliness. How they’d left him before, to spare him the pain of it, to keep from devouring him whole.

“I’ll do it,” he says softly.

They look towards him, their posture startled and a touch guarded. His heart squeezes. So little it took, to bring them back to this, mistrusting and fearful. Just petty cruelty and exploitation of their own fears.

He reaches out, takes the matchbook. They let him. The touch of his fingers on the skin of their palm is a shock. They don’t feel like human skin. They feel like themselves, slick-soft and too-smooth and devastatingly familiar.

They flinch, shiver. He pulls his hand back, contrite. “Sorry.”

They shrug, turn aside, and for the first time he has the overwhelming urge to step up behind them, embrace them like a human, fold himself around them instead of the other way around.

He lights the stove with shaking fingers. The ring of blue flame doesn’t cast much light, but they’re both used to seeing in the dark. Eyes shaped for the sewers, the shadows, the deep places of the world.

Another scrape of metal, they’re taking down a larger pot from a rack on the wall, moving it to the sink. They flip on the water.

“We shouldn’t need any more for the macaroni,” he says. Such a bizarrely normal sentence.

**_“Not for the macaroni,”_ ** they say. ** _“Heat it when the food is done. So Dylan can have a bath.”_**

“A bath?” says Dylan hopefully from his pile of towels, and Eddie feels like an idiot.

“That’s a good idea,” he says. “You can warm up.” He looks back at them. “Thank you.”

Their shoulders hunch, and they shut off the water.

The pot bubbles, and Eddie goes to stir in the macaroni. He stands over it, feels warm steam collect in his beard. The other lingers near the sink.

He fishes out a noodle with the tip of a spoon and picks it up, hissing softly as the heat burns his fingers. He pops it in his mouth, chews; _ al dente _, just right.

He grabs the wooden handle of the pot, hoists it off the stove. He turns to find the other already moving, lifting the stock pot out of the sink, the two of them passing each other, like the steps of a dance they already know. They place the pot on the fire as he moves to tip out as much of the boiling water as he can.

They tense as he moves back beside them to set the pot on a cold burner, but don’t move away. He dumps the packet of powdered cheese in with the remaining pasta water, stirs until the sauce starts to congeal, a vibrant, unnatural orange.

Dylan wanders over to look, a towel draped over his head like a little babushka. Eddie opens the cupboard, puts his hand on a stack of bowls. He pulls out three, starts to spoon out the macaroni. He puts one on the table with a spoon and motions to Dylan.

**_“None for me,”_ ** says his other shortly, when he tries to hand them a bowl. He hesitates, hand clutched around warm porcelain.

“Hang on a moment then,” he says. He puts the bowl down on the kitchen table and goes to the refrigerator. There’s a carton of eggs, on the top shelf, and just behind them, wrapped in foil…

“Here,” he says.

It’s a bar of chocolate, good sized, one of the high percentage cocoa ones that’s nearly black. They look at him, uncertain.

“Please,” he says.

They take the chocolate. Perch on one of the chairs. Eddie seats himself, realizes he’s forgotten to give either Dylan or himself a spoon, and has to get back up to search the drawers. None of this stops Dylan, who’s eating his macaroni with his fingers with aplomb.

He puts the spoon next to Dylan. The boy ignores it. He considers objecting and gives up, sits down and starts to eat his own food. His other unwraps the chocolate, breaks off a chunk and places it in their mouth. He catches the slightest glimpse of a shadow of needle teeth in the dark.

“Can I have some?” says Dylan.

Eddie opens his mouth to object, but they break off a little corner and pass it to Dylan. The boy puts it in his mouth and makes a face. “Bitter.”

**_“Many necessary things are,”_ ** says his other.

Eddie’s heart drops into his stomach. “Not always,” he says. “Sometimes there’s sweet underneath, if you let it linger.”

Their eyes flash as they look at him, just a flicker of light from the shadows. They haven’t lowered their hood, though it must be part of them. He swallows hard, holds their gaze.

They look away, sigh, a peculiar, human gesture on them. They get up, walk back to the refrigerator.

They take out the carton of eggs, set it on the table. They flip up the lid, take out an egg, a brilliant, white oval in the dark. Their mouth opens, just a bit too wide, lips peeling back to reveal their teeth, and they swallow the egg whole.

Without a word, without looking up, they work their way through the entire carton, consuming each one, deliberate and unhurried.

Dylan has stopped eating and is staring at them with a mix of shock and fascination. Eddie can feel the weight of his own spoonful of noodles, sagging down as he sits there, out of words.

They close the empty carton, set it aside, and pick up the chocolate again. Eddie kicks his brain back into gear and works to finish his macaroni.

They finish the chocolate and get up from the table. The stockpot is simmering, and they hoist it off the stove without bothering with a pot holder. They walk in the direction of the bathroom and vanish into the hall. Eddie hears running water and then the cascade of them pouring from the pot. They reappear at the entry to the hallway.

**_“There,”_ ** they say. ** _“It should be the right temperature.”_**

“Right,” says Eddie. He looks at Dylan, uncertain. “Do you...need help?”

Dylan shakes his head. “No. I know how to bathe myself.” He hops up from the table, stops, reconsiders, and takes his bowl to the sink. He stops beside the other as he scurries for the bathroom.

“Thank you,” he says.

The other hesitates. “** _You are welcome.”_ **

Dylan vanishes into the bathroom. Eddie gets up to wash their bowls. There’s a recycling bin in the kitchen and his other drops the egg carton into it.

“Can we,” says Eddie, his stomach twisting. “Can we talk?”

**_“Later,”_ ** they say, not looking at him. ** _“When he has gone to bed.”_**

They sit on opposite ends of the couch, the pile of towels scrunched between them like a crude fence. From the other room they can hear Dylan splashing about.

Eddie never considered himself as someone who had a problem with silence. In the early years, his other had barely spoken with human speech, but now the sense of occupying the same space unspeaking feels heavy, oppressive with the knowledge that speaking is the only method left to them.

**_“Did you find him something to wear?”_ ** they say, startling him from his thoughts.

“Oh,” he says. “No, thank you.”

They make an unnecessary sound of acknowledgement he knows is for his benefit. There’s two other rooms in the apartment, a bedroom with a queen bed and a second one made up as an office. There’s a little foldable daybed in it, already made with sheets and covered with a dark comforter. He pilfers a man’s t-shirt from the bedroom, long and thick enough to use as a nightshirt for a small boy.

He taps at the door to the bathroom. “Dylan? I have pajamas.”

He hears the splash of water and Dylan appears at the door in an oversized towel. He hands off the shirt and waits for the boy to wriggle into it, then indicates the office. “There’s a bed. Why don’t you try and get some sleep?”

The daybed is made up with a pleasingly warm comforter and Dylan cuddles down grateful among the blankets. Eddie hesitates, then rests a hand on his small head, pets at the damp hair.

“Sleep well, kid. We’ll be in the other room if you need us.”

Dylan blinks up at him through sleepy and uncertain eyes. “Okay.”

He returns to the living room, sits heavily on the couch. His other is sitting silent, threading the hem of one of the towels through long fingers. He looks at them. They don’t look at him, but he’s aware they don’t need to do so.

“Can we talk?”

** _“That is why I came.”_ **

“I know.” He lets out a huff of breath. “I wanted...to ask, I guess.”

** _“About Anne.”_ **

“About Mary.”

They twitch, just the slightest hint of surprise. ** _“You had your answers, did you not?”_ **

“No, not really.” Eddie scrunches up his face, rubs at his itching beard. “It doesn’t make sense ?”

** _“What does not?”_ **

“There were other people who saw Mary, other people who knew her. If...I believed I had a sister but she was just a delusion, there wouldn’t be records, other memories, other _ people _. Even with...even with you gone, I can sometimes remember moments with her, as a kid. And later, when I was grown, and we sat on the steps of the big house in San Francisco, and she showed me the old scar on her hand where she’d burned herself, spilling hot oil on the housekeeper’s day off, because she was a little too short to work the stove right. And we talked about how Carl would tell you to stop bawling, because he had work to do.” He shakes his head. “But the memories slip away and it’s like there’s someone shouting in my head how she was never there at all. But that’s not correct either.” He sighs. “I don’t know it exactly, but my intuition says it isn’t right.”

Silence.

“You...don’t have any opinions?”

**_“You will believe what you wish to,”_ ** they say. ** _“My opinions on whether you had a sister named Mary are a moot point.”_**

He sighs, frustrated. “But they’re _ not _ , you see? Why you, of everyone? Why would you be the only one trying to convince me I had a sister at all? If you didn’t want me to be with anyone else, why not make me think I was an only child? That I was all alone in the world? Why make me believe that we’d ever reconciled? Why go through the elaborate ruse of making me think she was dead _ then _? No, if someone’s true goal was to convince me I was totally alone, that there was no one and no family I could ever rely on…”

** _“Then why not make you believe someone who’d brought you comfort never existed at all?”_ **

“Exactly.”

** _“But you do have family upon which you can rely. The child.”_ **

Eddie bites his lip. This is the part he’s been dreading. “Dylan...he’s great, he’s fine but...he also doesn’t make sense.”

** _“How do you mean?”_ **

“He’s...he’s just weirdly convenient. All of my family is hateful or unreliable or never existed, but then he just pops up, all damaged in ways that only I would understand, all ready to be loved? And Anne…”

They stiffen and Eddie swallows hard.

“I don’t...and Anne, she wouldn’t have given her baby, our baby, to Carl. An orphanage maybe, but she knew, she _ knew _. She’d seen all the broken parts of me. She knew what he was like. She wouldn’t do that to a child.”

** _“Perhaps she was distraught, and driven mad by desperation.”_ **

“Bullshit,” the bitter word exits him like a punch. “Anne was a lawyer. Top of her class at ESU. Even after everything I did. She was whip smart and empathetic and anyone who tries to claim that...trauma and pregnancy would have somehow stripped her of all reason is a misogynistic idiot.”

They don’t answer.

“Something about Dylan...” Eddie sighs and buries his face in his hands, “isn’t right.”

He feels them shift on the couch beside him. ** _“It does not matter.”_ **

“It _ does—” _

**_“I am telling you it does not.”_ ** He glances at them between the bars of his fingers to see them staring up towards the ceiling. ** _“It was always in you to love a child, regardless of everything. The child’s origin is never the child’s fault.”_**

Every breath feels like broken glass. “But...after what happened to you. I _ felt _ it. When it happened, I was _ there. _ And after. Not always, but sometimes. It would bleed over, what they did to you, in that lab, that _ violation _. You’re asking me to accept that you would do that, inflict that, on someone else.”

They do not reply.

“Please answer me.”

**_“The child’s existence is my fault,”_ ** they say. ** _“That is all you need to know.”_**

Eddie’s fingers dig into his scalp.

**_“You have your answers,”_ ** they say. ** _“This place should be safe for the night. I will go.”_**

“Please don’t.” The words slip out unbidden. “Please stay.”

A small sound of irritation escapes them. ** _“To what end, Eddie? To what purpose? You told me to leave you forever less than a day ago. Am I to come and go only at your whim? Do my own desires matter not at all?”_ **

“No, they do, they do.” Eddie releases his hair and looks at them. “There’s no end, no purpose. I miss you, that’s all.”

** _“Sometimes we miss things that are bad for us.”_ **

“Is that a backhanded way to say you miss me too?”

They look at him, exasperation plain even with most of their face still hidden. Their mouth is strangely human in barred, faint light from the windows. He’s fixed by the sight of it. Outside, he can hear the faint sounds of conflict.

Words are of no use here, he realizes. So strange and frustrating, the bread and butter of his profession, his existence, crumbled to ash. Once they could speak as one being but no longer. He does the only thing he can think to do.

He reaches.

They flinch at his touch against their cheek and he freezes, heart pounding. Their skin is cool and smooth, slick and soft as it is in his memories. He rests his fingertips against their jaw, cradling it as lightly as he would a butterfly. 

_“I need you,” _ he sings, humming so soft the tune is more in his throat. _ “More than anybody else has needed anyone before.”_

** _“I…”_ **

So human, the way they’ve shaped themselves, the way they respond. Human, like the young man with brown hair and green eyes whom Eddie used to see at Mass, who drew his gaze for reasons that Eddie never knew, who left him running the beads of the Rosary up and down through bony fingers until the day he wore it out, and the chain broke.

Human, so he offers a human gesture. That most human of gestures, to one who never has been.

There are no words to describe the sound that escapes them. It’s grief and shock and yearning all knotted into an indistinguishable mass. He tilts his head and gently fits their mouths together. Not pushing, not demanding, just the lightest of caresses, that single point of connection, joining them in the only other way he knows how.

They tremble all over, like their flesh will dissolve, and melt slightly, sagging into him. He draws them in, cradles them close. He kisses them deeply, eases them back against the couch cushions.

A pass of his mouth on theirs draws a gasp out of them and his pulse quickens. He licks his way between thin lips and against needle teeth, tastes blood where he pricks his tongue.

_By the pricking of my tongue, someone who loves thee this way comes._

They rip their mouth from him with a gasp and liquify in his arms, slipping to the floor and slithering across the rug to crouch formless against the legs of the kitchen table like an ominous spider.

**_“No,”_ ** they say. ** _“No, no no.”_**

He swallows, sits up slow. “I’m sorry.”

**_“Why?”_ ** they demand. ** _“Why would you do that?”_**

“Because I wanted to,” he says. “And because I love you.”

They flinch at the word, rear back and flare like an enraged cobra.

**_“And why now?”_ ** the words are a snarl. ** _“Why tell me now, when I am this? Because I donned a suit of human skin? Because you could pretend? I am not human, Eddie!”_**

They surge up from the floor, growing and expanding, coiling out like an Amazonian serpent, thick and heavy and dark as pitch. Their eyes bleed milk across their blunt muzzle, mandibles branch out and multiply into tiered, snapping appendages. Their maw opens, revealing rows of knitting needle teeth like something risen from the depths of the abyssal sea. 

**_“THIS is what I am, Eddie! THIS is what you kiss with human lips and caress with human hands!”_ ** They snarl and the infrabass echo of their voice rattles the windows. ** _“I will never be human! And I do not! Enjoy! Human! Games!”_**

They loom over him, nearly brushing the ceiling, huge and furious and wounded, hostility evident in every line of their body, and as breathtaking as they’d been when they’d faced him down in the streets of New York so long ago. Then as now, he breathes deep, holds himself together. He rises from the couch, steps closer, watches them waver.

“No games,” he says. “I kissed you. Even if you weren’t beautiful like this, you know I don’t care what you look like.”

**_“You lie,”_ ** they hiss. ** _“I saw your dreams, the way you hid from the men who made your body rise. You could not even bear to IMAGINE anyone besides a woman and I am to believe you would embrace this!”_**

He approaches, slowly, telegraphing his movement and, he hopes, his intentions. They bare their teeth, but he doesn’t flinch. He reaches out and runs his fingers across the leftmost mandible closest to their mouth. The appendage twitches, claw curling, and he tangles his fingers around it. Bends his head and presses kisses along the curve of the claw. Raises up on his toes and kisses the point of their muzzle. Kisses down the vertical thicket of their teeth.

“I would,” he says. “And I will. Come to bed?” he swallows and steadies himself. “Please, darling?”

All their flesh cringes. He knows the phrasing, deliberate, the invitation of a spouse. He lifts his arms and embraces the thick, limbless coils of them. “I know you can taste the truth of it on my skin.”

They curse, quick and furious, another human habit. Eddie finds himself scooped up in their coils, borne with surprising silence down the short hallway. He’s deposited on the bed with a creak of springs. Hears the door click shut.

They’re half-visible above him, a huge and darkened web, merged with the shadows of the city. He reaches for them.

They fit the thickness of their body between his legs, coil around him. He feels sharp mandibles comb his hair, a tongue emerges to trace his throat.

**_“You reek of elf magic,”_ ** they grumble.

A sharp coil of shame in his belly. “I know. I wanted...I missed you so badly. I thought, I wasn’t thinking.”

**_“Fool,”_ ** they say. ** _“Beloved fool, but fool nonetheless.”_**

“Your fool,” he tells them, squeezes them tight. Kisses dark flesh and rubs up against them, lets them feel how much he wants them in the only way he can.

Their tongue pushes into his mouth and he sucks on it with a sublimated longing for weight and heft in his mouth and in his throat. They press deeper and he chokes slightly, eyes watering. He’s so hard he’s dizzy with it.

They cradle him as they fuck his throat, coaxing him to swallow them down. He thinks they could rejoin this way, plunge within and open him up, but then they withdraw. He coughs, breathes deep.

**_“I want it off you,”_ ** they hiss. ** _“I can smell it on your breath, in the oils seeping from your skin.”_**

“Take it from me,” he hears himself beg.

As if in answer, the weapon surges under his skin, hot and angry. It races across his flesh, envelopes him, and they growl in response. He experiences a dizzying moment of duality in which he is _ them _ and not them, in which his mind splinters between the two states. Malekith’s magic chokes him, a stranglehold.

“Peel me open,” he tells them. “Like the lindworm in the story.”

They do.

The pain is unimaginable, like being flayed alive. He writhes in animal instinct as they hold him, hush him, peel back the layers of dark, which stretch and cling to his skin like tanker oil.

**_“He is not yours,”_ ** they growl, and he knows they aren’t speaking to him. ** _“He is himself, not a tool of your war, a weapon for your use.”_**

Tears squeeze from the edges of his eyes, pain from within and without. _ Neither are you _, he wants to say, and the knowledge they can’t hear him is a knife in the gut.

The stone falls to the floor. He hears it rattle, roll away into the darkness.

They slide over bare skin, fragile warp and weft of his clothing shredded in the quiet altercation. He’s gone somewhat soft again, but they drape one of their coils over his naked hips, open themselves up and allow him to slide inside them.

He gasps, sharp and elated, hitches his arms around them. They undulate against him, like the serpent embracing Lilith. He wants to beg for them within, knows he doesn’t have the right. Spreads himself in invitation and closes his eyes, hoping and dreading that they’ll somehow know, will offer him even this pale imitation of how he longs to have them.

They squeeze around him and he bucks, helpless in their coils. ** _“What? You want me so much you are willing to play the sodomite?”_ **

He flinches. “It’s not like that.”

**_“It _ ** **is,** ** _ Eddie. I have seen the tracks of your thoughts. I know that even if you care nothing of what it means for others, the poisonous mushrooms which grow in your mind tell you it is sin. Sin for you. Sin to want it even.”_ ** They growl low. ** _“I will not perform such an act and allow you to project it off, pretend you did not choose it, enjoy it.”_**

“I do choose it.”

** _“No, you are expecting it to hurt. I can read it in your muscles, taste it on you. You think it a punishment, a tit-for-tat. That I might take compensation out of your flesh.”_ **

Eddie closes his eyes, breathes through the visceral feeling which tightens his throat, tries to sift through layers of indoctrination and trained instinct to access himself, the core of his heart that is a stranger even to him.

But not to them.

“I want you,” he says, and it tastes like Truth with a capital T. “I want you inside me...yes for us to be as one but also…” He swallows. “I trust you. I know you wouldn’t hurt me that way. And maybe I couldn’t face myself then, but I can now. I want it for what it is.”

** _“What?”_ **

“An act of love.”

He feels their flinch of surprise. He holds them tight. “Please. Like this, so I can see you.”

They hesitate, but then shift around him, move their body to fit his. A clawed hand cradles the back of his skull and he feels himself relax, head dropping, throat exposed. Something hard presses up against him.

They enter and breath escapes him. It’s both agonizingly distancing and unbearably intimate. They move, thrust, and he knows they’ve formed themselves a human shape within him if not without. Inescapable, pointed, to remind him of the meaning of the act. They’re big, in a way the deep parts of his brain find shamefully and instinctively satisfying. There’s no pain, just pleasure in the mind and in the body, the alien sensations of being opened, of tightening down around them. 

**_“If you had done this before we met, I wonder,”_ ** they say. ** _“Had cast aside your shame and fear of sickness and opened yourself to a man. Would we have spent so long in endless circling?”_**

“You’re not a man.”

**_“No, but you frequently read me as one.”_ ** They thrust in sharp and pleasure ripples up his spine.

“If I had done this before we met,” he says, his breath hitching. “I would have begged you to take me there in the confessional.”

Claws convulse against his skin and he thrills at this evidence of their loss of control, that they feel something of this tidal wave of want and longing. He kisses them, clings tight.

“Can you tell how close I am?”

** _“Of course.”_ **

He shivers all over, hair rising on his limbs. “Can you make me come like this? From inside?”

**_“I could make you come with a single touch to your neural tissue.”_ ** A tongue, thick and long as a python, coils around his neck. ** _“And I could fuck you for a week and never let you.”_**

He moans, shaky and too loud, fears they’ll be heard. He wants them to suck him, at the same time doesn’t want it, wants to come on them, around them. He’s still engulfed somewhere inside their mass, cradled in a way he associates with _ safe _ and _ familiar _.

Pressure from inside, acute and directed, in a way he knows instinctively no human could accomplish. He finds his mouth stoppered with their tongue, quenching his helpless sounds as he spills in them. They hold him through it, trace the lines of his fingers with their own.

They wait for his breathing to slow, and keep fucking him.

The sensation is strange, uncomfortable, but at the same time desirable. He doesn’t know if they can come like this, _ disconnected _, and the shape of the word is glass in his chest and an ache in his throat. Their thrusts are steady, measured, providing a low level stimulus from within until Eddie begins to harden once more. He senses he can’t quite make it far enough to come again, but he relishes the sensation of rubbing half hard against slick flesh.

They bottom out inside him, or at least mimic the act, and he feels them pulse and swell within him. They stay deep and he has to bite his tongue to keep from begging them to cross the final threshold, penetrate blood and brain and bone and retake him. He fancies he feels an alien sensation, something like wetness inside.

“Are you coming in me?”

** _“You know that is not possible like this.”_ **

“With us like this.”

They twitch at the word. ** _“Sometimes you would imagine it, what it might be like. When you were with Anne. With Beck. You would touch your own spill and wonder how it would feel to be filled with it.”_ ** They withdraw slowly and a soft sound escapes him. They capture one of his hands, guide it between them. The angle is awkward and the Gordian knot of their mass confuses, but they press his fingers against the slick, tender place which they entered. ** _“How does it feel, Eddie?”_ **

“Please.” The word spills out, uncontrollable. They urge him on, coax his own fingers inside him. They watch as he twists and rocks, clumsy, learning like he should have learned himself decades earlier, before he was taught such things were _ bad _ and _ wrong _ and _ sinful _ and _ not for you never for you _.

They tuck one of their coils beneath the small of his back, angle his hips and wrap their tongue around him. Suck him, steady and implacable, while he writhes on his fingers, until he’s coming again. He feels the squeeze of his body on his own hand, and bites his lip against the moan in his chest.

“I want you to come,” he says, before he can stop himself. He pulls free of the clutch around his fingers and reaches. “I want to help you come.”

They rest the oversized weight of their head against his hipbone and sigh. ** _“I know what you are asking. And I do not think it a good idea.”_ **

Heat pricks at the edges of his eyelids. “I’m sorry.” He draws a shuddering breath. “I know you don’t want to be us.”

**_“You know nothing of what I want,”_ ** they say, and that deep quality, that dips below the threshold of his hearing and resonates against places in the roots of his brain, is back in their voice. ** _“If I were to give in to what I want, I would be sunk in you to the _ ** **marrow** ** _, Eddie. Braided through your nerves and wrapped around your pleural sac, tasting your heartbeat and the lighting crackle of neurotransmitters storming through your brain like a thunderhead. Do not speak to me of what I _ ** **want.”**

“Then...why?”

** _“Because you made it clear you do not trust me. And because there are entities drawing nearer with designs on how to inflict pain or death or worse upon us.”_ **

“Then where do we go from here?”

**_“Sleep,”_ ** they say. ** _“I will keep watch. And in the morning we seek aid.”_**

“Aid? From whom?”

An exasperated noise. ** _“Just because you have convinced yourself that you are all alone in the world does not mean everyone else has. Besides, I have a promise to keep to an old friend.”_ **

He wants to ask _ who _ and _ where _ and _ what _, but pushes down the urge. “Will you sleep next to me? Hold me? Like you used to in the apartment?”

** _“Very well.”_ **

He molds his hand against their mass, as if he can keep them from slipping through his fingers, and the darkness of sleep swallows him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun little tidbit, as I've already indicated that music will be a major plot point in this: the snippet of song that Eddie sings is [I Need You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y96iiKgBuU) by The Kinks, the band referenced in _Venom: First Host_ as one of Sleeper's favorites.


End file.
